Following the success of sxc.hu (stockxcng) and the commercial followup stockxpert, both bought by Jupiter media then Getty in turn, Hungarian developers 'Dream Group' have just launched a new microstock site stockfresh.com.

Another new microstock site... Is it just another one that will flop in a couple of years?

I can't answer that question, but not all new microstock sites launch, stagnate and close leaving little but some unhappy forum posts. Deposit photos have been trickling in sales for me (a surprise!), pixmac seems to have been growing their business steadily too. Most of the photographers who had 'time' to upload to stockxpert before getty pulled the plug are perhaps looking for somewhere else to upload, admittedly that space might have already been filled by corbis' veer.

So what has stockfresh got going for it?

The failure (and subsequent resurrection) of crestock shows us that even if you have a good sized image collection, professional site with all the right features and marketing 'toys' there is no guarantee of success. So what weapons does stockfresh have to defend itself in the microstock jungle:

The site launched on Tuesday with 100,000 photos. Clearly with other agencies paying incentives to build image collections stockfresh faces stiff competition, there was a time that 100,000 images made an agency a pretty important player in microstock, now it seems that 1 million is more the 'start line' we expect. StockFresh has some work to do to attract photographers and buyers to their startup. Peter Hamza, one of Stockfresh's founders says the agency has been built from scratch with the values "simplicity, quality, fair pricing and last but not least fair commissions".

I'll be uploading my images to StockFresh to try things out (with obvious hopes), as ever a review will follow...

Well I guess so long as it starts loading that full size preview the moment you hover over and not give you the low res zoom then load the other preview image after the fade then its not too bad - I guess mac lovers enjoy that kind of thing, most of them seem to enjoy losing a few fractions of a second here and there watching menus and windows roll around the screen. I like things to snap into place too. initialy that fade makes you think 'ooh nice -quality' but after a couple of hovers you start to think 'uerrrr, sticky feeling, slow'.

I don't think all that much of the 'search mix' at the moment either, but with no record of sales or clicks to go on for an agency only a few days old then the search is perfectly acceptable for now - and if it's been done right will improve over time as to top sellers and most viewed start to float up.